Statac

Getting started

Install Statac, make a site, write its first page and see it in the browser.

This page gets you from nothing to a page in your browser in four steps. After that, the tutorial builds a whole personal site, one part at a time.

1. Install Statac

On a Mac or Linux, in a terminal:

curl -fsSL https://get.statac.dev | sh

On Windows, in PowerShell:

irm https://get.statac.dev/install.ps1 | iex

Each asks where to put Statac and whether it should keep itself up to date: press Enter to take the answer in brackets. To see what each command does, or to install with Homebrew, Scoop or Cargo, see Installing. It also has a package for every kind of machine.

2. Make a site

statac new my-site
cd my-site

statac new asks five questions: the site’s title, the author’s name, its URL, its language and its time zone. Press Enter to take the answer in brackets, or to leave an answer empty. It saves your answers in statac.yaml, the site’s settings, and makes an empty content/ folder for your pages. See Starting a site.

3. Write a page

In content/index.md:

---
title: Hello
---
This site is new.

This is the home page. The lines between the two --- lines are its front matter; below them is its content, in Markdown.

4. See it

statac serve
1 note: 1 built-without-template. Run `statac check` to see it.

Started `published.txt` with the 1 URL this site publishes, so a later build can say when one is no longer published. Commit it with the site.
Wrote 1 page to `.statac/serve` in 0.02 seconds.
Serving `.statac/serve` at http://localhost:3000/
Press Ctrl+C to stop.

Open http://localhost:3000/ in your browser to see the page. Change the page and save it, and the browser reloads with the change.

You can ignore the first two lines for now:

  • The note says the page has no template, so it’s published as its content alone: no title, no styles. That’s expected, because Statac doesn’t put any templates into a new site. Add one when you’re ready: part 3 of the tutorial has a first templates/page.html, and Drop-ins has a stylesheet to copy.
  • published.txt is Statac’s record of the URLs the site has published, so it can warn you if one ever goes missing. Commit it with the site. See keep track of published URLs.

The tab in the corner of the page is the debug panel, which statac serve adds while you write. It shows the site’s problems, and every value a template can use on the page.

When something is wrong

When Statac finds a problem, it shows the file, the line, the exact text and what to do:

error  Unclear date: `4/10/2026` could be 4 October or 10 April
  content/index.md, line 3
   3 │ date: 4/10/2026
     │       ^^^^^^^^^
  Write it as `2026-10-04` or `2026-04-10`.
  More: https://statac.dev/e/unclear-date/

The More: link opens a page explaining that kind of problem. You can read the same explanation in the terminal:

statac explain unclear-date

Problems explained lists every kind.

Where next?

Something unclear or wrong? Open an issue.